Swim Back to Me Read online

  How do people do it, pry themselves from their pasts? “Pry” makes it sound dramatic, but it isn’t. I wish I could say my life in the natural world began with a transformative experience: like the fishing weekend with my father, only successful. An epiphanic trip to the mountains, a hike along a rushing river that taught me how I wanted to live. But that’s not how it happened. The course of true progress is boring. You don’t just suddenly become an outdoorsman, just as you don’t just suddenly become assertive and independent, ridding yourself forever of your shabby victim rags. It’s incremental. Think of that frog, the one in Karl’s picture. There wasn’t a single moment when he passed into maturity, a single instant when an observer could cry, “Look, he’s a frog now!” No, it happened slowly, beginning with four tiny bumps, four promises of the legs that would widen the world for him beyond anything he could conceive of in his watery tadpole dreams.

  Sasha left on Tuesday; by Friday the hot weather was back. It was time for another weekend with my mother, and Friday evening, when I arrived, she presented me with three flavors of ice cream to choose from, her way of acknowledging that we were on our new schedule now, with my visits occurring every other weekend, as she’d wanted. Her apartment was an oven, and she said we’d find a swimming pool tomorrow for sure, or else spend the day in a nice, cool movie theater.

  But in the morning she said there was somewhere she wanted to go first, and I wasn’t surprised when she drove us to the ghetto again. I thought of asking why, but I didn’t want to hear her earnest lecture. I decided to be stoic and keep my mouth shut.

  This time she parked, and we got out of the car. “Let’s just walk,” she said. “I want you to get comfortable here,” and we started up the sidewalk, the day warm already though it wasn’t yet ten o’clock. A couple of men stood in front of a drugstore, and they stopped talking and openly sized up my mother as we went by.

  At the corner up ahead of us, a skinny young woman stood with three children, two of them clutching her leg and wailing. The third was older, a girl two or three years younger than I. As we approached, the woman slapped one of the crying children and pushed the other away, snapping, “Pick him up,” at the girl, “come on, do,” and giving the little boy another push for good measure. The girl bent over and picked up the boy, held him under his bottom as he flailed and screamed, and by now we’d gotten close enough that I had to look away to avoid eye contact with her.

  My mother went right up to the woman. “Do you need any help? Can I do anything for you?”

  The woman reared back and stared at my mother, an incredulous look on her face. “No, I don’t need no help. Who you think you are? Come on,” she said to the girl, and she grabbed the forearm of the child still at her feet and strode away, the other two following behind her.

  My mother looked at me and then looked away. “It’s not easy to accept help,” she said. And then, a little defiant: “I’m not sorry I offered.”

  “I didn’t think you were.” I stole a glance in the direction they’d gone; the older girl was looking over her shoulder at us. This time I let myself meet her gaze: a moment’s seeing each other and then she faced forward again.

  People walked past us, the two men from before, an old woman pushing an even older woman in a wheelchair. There was a yellow dog on the other side of the street, trotting back and forth and looking at us but not barking. Cars went by, some slowing as they came abreast of us, the people inside giving us long curious looks.

  My mother began walking again. “I thought we could stop and say hi to a friend of mine.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman from work. Patrice.”

  “Oh, right,” I said, remembering the flowers from my mother’s birthday. “The cleaning lady.”

  “Richard!”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. Never mind.” She opened her purse and pulled out a small spiral-bound notebook. “I think it’s this way,” she said, flipping through the pages. “Around that corner.”

  We went around a corner onto a street lined with run-down clapboard houses, each with a steep flight of steps leading to a front door. Checking her notebook, my mother slowed down, studied the front of each house before continuing on. “We’re looking for forty-seven,” she said. “But I haven’t seen any numbers, have you?”

  I’d seen a small 23 on one house, but I didn’t say so. On we went, my mother scanning, me keeping quiet. Across the street, three teenage boys lounged on a flight of steps, two side by side and the third a few steps up, his face tipped to the sky. Behind him was the ghost of a number, 52. I looked at my mother and saw that she’d lost some of her resolve; she’d put the notebook away and pulled her purse strap higher on her shoulder.

  “I just don’t know,” she said.

  “You could call her. If we could find a phone.”

  My mother frowned. I saw she didn’t want to call; I saw she wanted to leave.

  “Couldn’t you?”

  “I don’t have her phone number.”

  “You could find a phonebook.”

  “You’ve got a lot of your father in you,” she said. “Did you know that?”

  I did; she’d said so many times. I could remember being a very small boy and feeling hugely proud of it. I didn’t know when it had changed from being a good thing to being a bad thing—for her but also for me.

  I looked over at the boys. They couldn’t have been less interested in us, this white lady and her kid. They were waiting for something, looked as if they could wait all day.

  “I’m sorry I said that,” my mother said. “Your father is a good man.”

  I looked away from her. “I thought we were going swimming.”

  “We are. And listen—I was thinking we could go out for dinner tonight.”

  “OK.”

  She looked into my eyes, and I knew I should be more enthusiastic. “That sounds good.”

  “We’ll make it an early birthday dinner,” she said, and she reached over and let her fingers brush my neck. “It’ll be nice. A nice dinner for a nice boy.”

  We started toward the main street again. A siren sounded somewhere nearby, just the one initial rising sound and then nothing. A small rubber ball lay on the sidewalk in front of me, and I kicked it into the street.

  “Good morning,” said a stout older lady as she approached, and my mother said good morning back. The lady wore a shiny lavender dress and carried a white purse over her forearm, and she beamed at me as she got closer.

  “Richard,” my mother whispered, “say hello,” but it was too late, the lady had passed us.

  I put my hands in my pockets, and my right fingertips touched paper. What’s that? I started to wonder, but then I knew. It was Sasha’s note. I’d solved the problem of what to do with it by doing nothing. If Gladys had been around this week, it might have ended up a hardened wad in the lint trap of the dryer. Instead, I’d accidentally brought it to Oakland, in the pocket of an unwashed pair of shorts.

  On we walked. Back at the main street, I spotted my mother’s car, up ahead of us in the next block. We’d been walking only twenty or thirty minutes, but I knew it would be a furnace.

  We approached a little grocery. I saw an old man sitting in the doorway, half in the store and half out, the lower part of his face covered by a patchy white beard. A wretched smell reached me as we came abreast of him: urine and whiskey and something rotten-smelling that made me gag. My mother stopped. The man was asleep, or close; his eyes were yellow slits, his body slumped sideways. She took her wallet from her purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. She glanced at me and then stepped closer to him. “Here you go,” she said, and she reached her hand toward him, but he didn’t move. She bent down as if she were going to set it on his lap, but at the last minute she let go of it, and it fluttered sideways, brushed his leg, and then, caught by a gust of air, turned over once and landed a few feet into the store.

  She looked at me and then looked into the store, where a middle-aged m
an stood behind the counter and watched us. There were shelves of canned food, open crates of vegetables, containers of milk in a refrigerator with a glass door. My mother was still, the counterman was still, the drunk at our feet was still. I stepped over his legs and picked up the money. When I turned around again, my mother was gone. I shrugged at the counterman, stepped back over the drunk’s legs, and followed after her. I caught up with her at the corner, where she was waiting for the light to change, and I held the bill out to her.

  “Keep it,” she said.

  The light changed, and she stepped off the curb and started across the street. I looked at the bill, started to put it in my pocket, changed my mind and followed after her. On the other side of the street, I held it out again.

  “I said keep it.”

  I put it in my pocket as we arrived at the car. It was incredibly hot inside, and I rolled down my window and leaned my head out. My mother turned the key, and the engine revved but then fell silent. She sighed and turned the key again, and now it caught, and she put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb.

  The traffic light was red. The grocery was the fourth or fifth business in the next block, and I could just see the drunk’s shoe poking out. A pair of teenage girls came out of the store, both with their hair in afros. I wondered what it would feel like, hair like that, if it would be soft or scratchy.

  The light changed. “Stop,” I said to my mother as we crossed the intersection and gathered speed, and she pulled over and jerked to a stop at the curb.

  “What?”

  “Wait a sec,” I said, and I got out of the car and approached the grocery. Inside, the counterman was ringing up a purchase, but I saw him see me. I stopped at the drunk. He had slumped a little more, and now his mouth was open, his lower lip revealing some missing teeth. A faint snore whistled out of him. His pants were black, and I could see the outlines of his thin legs under the cloth. He wore a jacket despite the heat, and under that a shirt of the kind my father usually wore: collar, buttons, breast pocket. I reached into my pocket, felt the heavier paper of the twenty, the slightly crinkled surface of Sasha’s note. I glanced over my shoulder: my mother was watching from the car, a look of pride, maybe even wonder, on her face. I turned back. The counterman had stopped what he was doing and was watching openly now, his hand resting on a brown and orange can of Yuban. I took the scrap of paper from my pocket, leaving the twenty behind, and, taking shallow breaths through my mouth, I leaned down and slipped it into the man’s breast pocket.

  It would be years before it occurred to me that with that one gesture I managed to kill two birds with one stone. And I do mean kill. And I do mean birds, though perhaps I should say it with an English accent, buds. It isn’t easy, admitting your murders.

  Molten

  At four-thirty Kathryn chose a last CD and put it into Ben’s stereo. Low, gritty guitar chords burst from the speakers, the speed of a terrified heartbeat. She eased herself onto his beanbag chair, her head knocking time. I have a present: it is the present. You have to learn to find it within you. She loved this song, the hard, repeated chords, the singer’s hoarse voice. Usually she couldn’t really enjoy the last CD, she was so busy dreading the moment when she’d have to stop for the day: five-fifteen, five-twenty at the latest in order to be downstairs before Lainie got home from track practice, followed just a little later by Dave returning from work. Today was different, though. Both of them were going out tonight. Kathryn would be back up here by seven-thirty, and then she’d have hours. A vast opportunity. A bonus. A reprieve.

  The verse went on, building to a glorious burst of sound, guitar bright and dirty at the same time, the fierce rat-a-tat of the drums. If you could save yourself, you could save us all. Go on living, prove us wrong. Your leap of faith could be a well-timed smile. Survival never goes out of style.

  A philosophy of life. A philosophy of life in a rock song, a wake-up call of a rock song! Kathryn might have been surprised, before. Now she knew. Ben’s music contained everything.

  She sang along to the next song, impatient without knowing why until the third one started and she understood she’d been waiting for it. It was her favorite on the album, the one she was always happiest to hear, although “happy” wasn’t really the word—“ravished” was more like it. She was ravished by the opening torrent of sound, by the way it thinned into a rocky stream of notes, and then into the vocals: Dreamed I was a fireman. I just smoked and watched you burn. (The first time she heard it, she thought it was “Jingo was a fireman.” Like the opening of a children’s story! Ben would’ve found that hilarious.) Dreamed I was an astronaut. I shot you down like a juggernaut. Dreamed we were still going out. Had that one a few times now. Woke up to find we were not. It’s good to be awake.

  Actually, the first time she heard it she couldn’t tell what the words were. It was just noise, across the board. Racket. This band and nearly every other. (Of course, that was only about a week after the funeral—she could hardly understand her husband then.) Still, horrible as most of it sounded, she kept listening: first to ten-second bits, then to whole songs, whole albums. And it took. There were still bands she couldn’t stand, but others: the way one singer sort of half screamed and half laughed; the deep, velvety dee-dee-dee-doo of a bass; the clatter and roll of a drum set.

  And the guitars. There’d been a moment early on when she suddenly stopped and asked herself just what instrument she was hearing, and when the answer dawned on her, obvious and shocking, her face actually filled with heat. Guitar. Electric guitar. What had she thought it was, a trumpet? How could she have arrived at the age of forty-five without knowing how an electric guitar sounded? She loved guitar now, the edgy off-sounding chords, the quick up-and-down wail of a line of notes, the occasional sweet, high, shimmering trill. Guitars could sing, cry, whisper, growl. Awesome, as Ben would have said.

  Dreamed I was a dream. I stole you away in your sleep. Saved you from afire, a gun for hire, I introduced you to a vampire.

  A song was a dream. That’s what Kathryn thought now. A song was someone else’s dream, and when you listened to it you became part of it, and you were linked to all the other people who had listened to it and all the people who would listen to it in times to come. In a phantom space somewhere, she and Ben floated behind dozens of songs together, hundreds of songs—separated by an enormous crowd.

  Forty minutes later, the CD was over. She went down to the kitchen. Outside, the sky was the dreary gray of old whites: socks and T-shirts thrown in too many times with a load of jeans. The breakfast dishes were still piled by the sink. She bit into a toast crust, then threw the tail end away. She arranged the dishes in the dishwasher and sat at the table. Just before five-thirty she heard Lainie stowing her bike, and then the front door opened and Lainie passed by the kitchen doorway on her way to the stairs.

  “Hi,” Kathryn called, and she heard Lainie stop and pause, then turn back.

  “Hi.” Lainie wore navy blue nylon running shorts and an old T-shirt of Ben’s, black with the word “Superchunk” written on it—the name of a band, obviously, though Kathryn remembered trying for a joke when she first saw him wearing it: What’s that, a kind of peanut butter? And Ben … well, he gave her a smile, of course. A forbearing smile.

  Lainie’s muscular legs were red from her workout, and her face was still splotchy. Standing in the doorway, she dropped her backpack, then pulled her ponytail elastic out and shook her head. She’d wash her hair and come down with wet spots on the shoulders of whatever T-shirt she put on next, smelling of the apricot stuff she used as conditioner, an oddly disturbing smell to Kathryn lately—musty somehow, like the inside of a rarely opened closet.

  “How was school?” Kathryn said.

  Lainie shrugged, though somewhere in her eyes there was a bit of surprise at being asked—Kathryn was a bit surprised, too.

  “The usual,” she said. “Mr. Nadler’s definitely got a screw loose. He had us spend half an hour looking at each other’s
palms and then writing descriptions of them.”

  “Of each other’s palms?”

  “It was about metaphors. Describe the palm in terms of something else. He’s a few flowers short of a bouquet.”

  Kathryn felt a smile pull at the corners of her mouth. A few boards short of a fort. A few letters short of a Scrabble game. A Ben and Lainie thing. How had it started? With Dave, now that she thought about it, saying someone was a few hot dogs short of a picnic, to the kids’ endless amusement.

  “What did you use?” Kathryn said.

  “Huh?” Lainie reached up her sleeve and scratched her shoulder, an absent look on her face. At odd moments Kathryn was amazed by her, by her athleticism—her tiny breasts and rough, manly habits. Lainie burped out loud, sat with her legs splayed. Kathryn sometimes thought of her as an emissary from some foreign place, sent to spy on the locals. She imagined Lainie composing her report: “And the mother was so soft. She sat around thinking all the time. Plus I never saw her run—not even when she was in a hurry.”

  “For your metaphor,” Kathryn said.

  “Oh.” Lainie rolled her eyes. “A desert. Real original, right? Allison did a tree for my hand.” She held out her palm and Kathryn looked, but she couldn’t really see the lines, just the tawny pads at the base of each finger. “It was all about branches,” Lainie went on, “because, like”—and here she switched to a high, flutey voice—“life can go in so many directions, you know?”

  A heaviness fell over Kathryn, like a lead apron—on her shoulders, her arms, her heart. Color rushed into Lainie’s face, and something passed between them for an electric moment. They were thinking of the same thing. So many directions, meaning so many wrong ones. The fallout of a moment’s choice—of an impulse. Kathryn put her chin in her hand and looked away.

  Lainie reached for her backpack and stood there for a moment, a shape in Kathryn’s peripheral vision. She said, “I guess I’ll get in the shower.”